Listening to a Hitchens podcast with Jeb Golinkin an interesting thought occurred to me that I hadn't much taken into consideration. That is the availability of world history to readers of the English language. Perhaps it is something I took for granted, but I don't really now. The mention of Penderel Moon, with whom I'm not familiar, spurred a search. There are six copies of his "Divide and Quit" in Amazon's cluster of sellers. At 75 dollars each, it seems to be rather precious information. It is an accounting, by an officer of the Raj, of how the British Empire left India in a rather sorry state, implicating another sort of failure in the empire, not so much of the way it conquered, but in the way it left them to all kill each other.
I gather now that I should exit politics and take advantage of this treasury. It will, of course, make my politics and philosophy so much better informed. But I do see the tragedy in this sort of devil take the hindmost attitude of what can't be described much better by me than disdain and cowardice. It's rather like Solomon deciding for the woman who would split the infant in half. Palestine, India, Bosnia, Korea, Germany. What's solved by giving rivals their own province and international standing as a state?
It brings me back again to Israel, whose history I don't know very well and yet I still persist in asking what is so great about a two state solution. If Gaza would be a state, why is it not a state? Surely Syria could say "We recognize the state of Gaza" and "We don't recognize the state of Israel". Appropriate embassies could be built or destroyed and surely the UN would take whatever postcard application is required for their membership requirements. There it is. Two states. Except the states would war because what the real situation demands is control of Jerusalem, and while Arabs retain civil rights and Parliamentary representation in the Knesset, this is not enough for those who would vote for Hamas or Fatah. A Muslim Brotherhood that could operate freely in a democratic Israel is insufficient liberty for the true desires of the Two State Solution.
That said, the current state of occupation is in every way superior to civil war. Israel must, and probably will starve Gaza and the West Bank.
The implications for my thinking are that I am drawing parallels to disintegration and failures of leadership which are either inevitably a matter of insufficient skill, or of insufficient will. But I am very wary of suggesting that political will be ramped up for the sake of any imperial ambition. While I labor in my contingent manner, hyena consultant as I must be for lack of lions, I surely wouldn't like the world to be oligopolized. But I still like Google search, don't you? Aren't you glad that you can find it all because some authority has its tentacles everywhere, and that some people are employed to spell it out for you in your own language? Doesn't that fuel all our chatter and isn't our chatter moral and political? What a shame it would be if English literature and history only went as far as the size and shape of today's mainstream media - if our best writers were Beck and Olbermann?
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